Broad Visions: Ceramics in the twentieth century church Lynn Pearson The origins of this survey of twentieth century church ceramics lay in the research carried out over the last ten years to produce the Society’s Tile Gazetteer, published in 2005. Locations described in the Gazetteer were drawn from a database which eventually comprised around 6,000 sites, covering all types of buildings, anything and everything from pubs to power stations. The driving force behind the Gazetteer project was the provision of information on these sites in order to encourage conservation and appreciation of architectural ceramics, so we soon had to face up to the need to make our make specialist knowledge available to the broader spectrum of conservation organisations. Although the Society produces a number of substantial publications, a website appeared to be a good method of reaching an even wider audience, so the TACS website was launched in April 2000. It was initially focussed on the Gazetteer project, but now has a much broader remit. At first the site carried almost the entire database, really simply a list, itself very much a work in progress and reflecting the current state of research as sites were being visited. Reports from even a few years earlier could often be quite misleading, as church tile pavements were carpeted over or buildings demolished. The database also included photographs and references to published works. The project ended with the publication of the Gazetteer containing details of the most significant 3,000 sites, and the replacement of the original website database with a searchable version that contained only verified sites; there is also an area for Gazetteer updates. Was this approach successful in getting information across to the various conservation organisations? We have to remember here that nineteenth century ceramic tiles were regarded, and still are in some quarters, as intrusive installations which ought to be removed. Even when taken seriously they were considered as craft rather than art, and as decoration rather than an intrinsic part of a building. This led to a chicken-and-egg situation when applying for funding: we were interested in all types of building, listed and unlisted, which incorporated tiles; however, the view of some heritage bodies was that only listed buildings were of sufficient interest to warrant research. Their agenda was set already, and could not take in new information. The problems from the point of view of these heritage bodies appear to have been: • Different and changing agendas - the agenda of bodies such as English Heritage and the national amenity societies, that is those with a legal function in the planning control process, is bound to be different from that of a small, specialist society with an unrivalled in-depth knowledge of a specific aspect of buildings 1 • Quantitative, too much information - nineteenth century tilework had not previously received the same academic approach as, say, nineteenth century stained glass, thus list descriptions were often poor in this area and even reference lists of building materials quite inaccurate in relation to decorative tilework; we were bombarding organisations with information they may not have been able to use • Qualitative, how reliable is information from a heritage body which is not a national amenity society - architectural historians in general may have perceived there was little information available on post-medieval tiles, thus there was nothing against which they could check the academic credibility of information provided by the Society The ‘consciousness-raising’ part of the Gazetteer project seems to have helped solve some of these problems, with the Tile Gazetteer now seen as a standard work of reference. The appearance on the Society’s website of reliable and updated site details should complement the book. The problems with making information available from the Society’s point of view obviously included lack of financial and other resources. Aside from that: • Lack of access to the English Heritage listed buildings database, which is generally available only to the national amenity societies and local councils; Images of England, which takes in listings up to 2000, is no substitute. So the Society was in the position of having and offering more accurate information than the listed buildings database appeared to hold, but being unable to access the database directly or feed information into it. • No national headquarters - and thus nowhere to store the growing project archive and make it accessible for researchers to inspect. The project archive has now been transferred to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library. • Not being a national amenity society - which we would not have the resources to be - and therefore not necessarily being informed about listed building applications which involved tile installations On the positive side, the benefits of the project to TACS were: • Creation of a network of information providers who then realised the significance of their tiles and could tell others about them • Raising the profile of tiles and architectural ceramics • Publication of the Tile Gazetteer • Creation of informal links between TACS and other heritage organisations Overall, and bearing in mind that the listed building system was changing during this project, and is still evolving, it was difficult to be certain that what TACS was providing was finding its way to where it would be most relevant. Other listing projects, because of their basis in a particular building type (synagogues), area or industry (Scottish ironwork), art form (sculpture) or field of archaeology (industrial archaeology), for instance, were able to access public 2 funding to develop their databases, but the Gazetteer project was not to any great degree because it was a nationally based project involving craftwork in all types of buildings. In fact, we were trying to move the goalposts in relation to what is considered significant about our architectural heritage, and only time will tell whether we have succeeded. We were trying to encourage a broader vision of decorative ceramics, which is where the twentieth century work comes in, ‘the sphere of broad visions’ of the post Second World War artistic world, which initially prized collective working for common goals.1 After the great nineteenth century boom in church tiling, fashions changed dramatically, and ceramics moved from being an everyday part of church decoration to something of a one-off, generally used for little more than a few memorials. Doulton’s, whose artist George Tinworth produced vast quantities of religious terracotta sculptures towards the end of the 1800s, lost substantial amounts of money as they allowed him to continue working well into the first decade of the twentieth century when his work was virtually unsaleable.2 The sculptor Gilbert Bayes, who often worked with Doulton’s using their polychrome stoneware, produced several stone, bronze and wood artworks for churches in the interwar years but nothing in ceramics, although he did design a stoneware funerary casket in 1928 which can be seen in the columbarium at Golders Green Crematorium.3 There are also several glazed polychrome ceramic plaques, mostly in the form of wreaths, in its main cloister. Terracotta was used in the early twentieth century for occasional headstones, but there are also a few Doultonware memorials, this grand example in Burslem Cemetery to Thomas Hulm of Longport, who died in 1905 and was organist at Burslem Sunday School for forty years. Sometimes tiles were used on gravestones, more often in the nineteenth century but here in 1913 at Skirlaugh in East Yorkshire, on the grave of David Reynard Robinson, tile enthusiast and builder of the tiled house Farrago in Hornsea. An exceptional tiled grave is that of the artist Alfred Wallis, who died in 1942 and is buried close to the Tate St Ives in the town’s Old Cemetery. The grave cover is of stoneware tiles made by Bernard Leach.4 Moving from memorials to the buildings themselves, a small number of churches were built using various forms of terracotta. St Peter’s Church in Galley Common, near Nuneaton, was built in 1909 with walls of hollow terracotta blocks apparently not made by the local firm Stanley Brothers but imported from Italy. Better known is the White Church, Fairhaven Congregational Church (1904-11), at Lytham St Anne’s. Its faience, tradename Ceramo, was supplied by the Middleton Fireclay Works, an offshoot of the Leeds Fireclay Company. Also well known is the now-redundant Church of St Osmund (1904-16) at Parkstone in Poole. The external detailing uses a combination of thin wire-cut bricks, hand- made locally at Newtown Vale Brickworks, and buff terracotta. The interior features a great deal of red and cream terracotta supplied by Carter’s of Poole. 3 There were also a few large-scale mosaic installations before and during the First World War, for instance at St Bartholomew’s Church, Brighton, in 1911 where the designer and mural painter F. Hamilton Jackson decorated the lower part of the east wall with mosaic figures. Much better known is St Aidan’s in Leeds with Frank Brangwyn’s fabulous mosaic mural, commissioned in 1909 and completed in 1916. A real curiosity is the Little Chapel in Guernsey at St Andrew, just west of the capital, St Peter Port. A religious community was set up there in 1904 by a French brotherhood, and in 1914 they built a tiny chapel, a miniature version of the grotto and basilica at Lourdes. It still exists, albeit much rebuilt and restored, and is covered with a mosaic of seashells, pebbles and broken china; it may well be the smallest chapel in the world. The ending of the First World War of course brought about the commissioning of many memorials, some of which used ceramics. This 1920 example in Ledbury has three mosaics of a soldier, sailor and angel at its base.